Deportation standoff not helping cause

August 17, 2006|By Eric Zorn.

Since the standoff on West Division Street is almost sure to end badly--with screams, shouts and tears broadcast worldwide--officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, ought to just get it over with, move in and arrest Elvira Arellano.

That sounds harsh, I know. She's not a dangerous outlaw or a threat to anyone. But the media/activist vigil at Camp Elvira in Humboldt Park is a bad business all the way around. It's generating lots of heat but shedding no light, whipping up ill will and retarding the cause of compassionate immigration reform.

Arellano, 31, is fighting deportation to Mexico by claiming sanctuary in a storefront church, defying the government to "send agents to a holy place" to arrest her.

ICE spokesman Tim Counts responded with a chilly promise--"We will take action at the time and place of our choosing"--but as of this writing Arellano is still holed up in the church and half a dozen TV trucks are parked nearby waiting for the inevitable wild rumpus.

It's fitting that the government is appearing hesitant, indecisive and even fearful on a matter relating to illegal immigration. Our leaders can't summon the political will to secure our borders and enforce our laws or lead a drive to build a consensus to reform those laws.

But Arellano's not helping things. She's not a particularly good cause celebre, as these things go. She has twice entered the country illegally, has been convicted of carrying a false Social Security card, speaks very poor English for someone who has been in this country nine years and she plays her so-called "anchor baby," a 7-year-old son who is a U.S. citizen because he was born here, as her trump card.

The strongest argument for giving her special dispensation seems to be that she's a well-known activist and "not a terrorist," which she keeps insisting even though no one says she is.

She compares herself to Rosa Parks, the black woman whose refusal in 1955 to give up her seat on the bus to a white man sparked the civil rights movement.

But Parks was defying unjust and immoral segregation. And Arellano and her supporters have yet to make the case--aside from declaring it so--that there is anything unjust or immoral about the laws under which she is being deported.

Unwise, perhaps. There are good arguments that it's in our best interests as a nation to create a "path to citizenship" or at least a robust guest-worker program for those who are here illegally; that immigrants enrich us culturally and economically.

Arellano--like you, like me--simply wants to provide for herself and her family, and she cherishes the opportunities of this amazing country. But her defiance, such as her declaration that her arrest and deportation will serve to illustrate "the hatred and hypocrisy of the current administration," drips with a sense of entitlement that many Americans find very off-putting.

By 9-1, respondents to an unscientific poll at chicagotribune.com Wednesday said Arellano should be arrested and deported. An online CNN poll linked to the network's coverage of the Arellano story showed 93 percent of respondents opposing the proposition that "anchor babies" should immunize a parent from deportation.

I monitored the scrum at our online message boards and found opposition to Arellano running both heavy and in some places nasty: She violated immigration laws to come here, work hard and build a better life, folks. That doesn't make her a "criminal."

Nor will deportation make her a victim. The U.S. must have laws on immigration. Every nation must. And we can't let sentiment or popularity or claims about what God would or wouldn't want to happen inside a church cause us to ignore them.

ICE shouldn't be frozen by the inevitability of an ugly scene in the church. It will only get worse as the situation drags on. And the rest of us shouldn't confuse a rejection of Arellano's claims today with a rejection of the idea that we should reform our immigration policies tomorrow in ways that nurture the dreams of the Elvira Arellanos of the world.